~

Monthly Archives: December 2013

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 45,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 17 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

That’s great, but let’s do better in 2014! Thanks, all, for reading and commenting and commiserating in 2013!

A stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway, near Pelham, NY (about a mile from the bridge I stood on), May 3, 2007. (Anthony22 via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

Thirty years ago on this date, on my fourteenth birthday, I was one thirteen-foot jump away from taking my own life. I’d felt this way before, quite a bit throughout ’81, ’82 and ’83, but I’d never come close to actually acting on my suicidal thoughts. I knew that despite getting beat by my then stepfather Maurice, neglected by Mom and family, ostracized at school and walking around with a kufi that only held the promise for more poverty, that my life wasn’t that bad. At least, compared to living in Biafra in the late-1960s or in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

But the support of my classmates after my recent mugging reminded me of the reality that I had no friends, and hadn’t had a friend for more than two and a half years. Combined with the silly season of the holidays and no birthday celebration for me for the sixth year in a row, I was so down on by the morning of Tuesday, December 27, ’83. So much so that when I went to the store for my Mom that mid-afternoon, the stone bridge across the Hutchinson River Parkway that connected Mount Vernon to Pelham via East Lincoln called to me. It might as well have said, “This is the way. This is the only way.”

From Boy @ The Window:

I looked down at the cars underneath as I put myself, one leg at a time, atop the short stone wall, meant to keep young kids from falling off the bridge. As I stood there, I kept thinking, “What do I have to live for anyway?” Tears started to well up as I continued to look down at the cars as they zoomed by on both sides of the four-lane parkway.

The suicide prevention message on the Golden Gate Bridge (#1 bridge in US to jump to one’s death), San Francisco CA, February 19, 2006. (David Corby/Miskatonic via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

Then I had thoughts. And having any thoughts at all, especially thoughts of anything other than suicide, will short-circuit any attempt to kill yourself. One was of the remote possibility that taking my life could actually hurt someone else, Mom, my family, maybe even my classmates or teachers. A second, even more sobering thought was that I could survive the thirteen-foot jump. Only to be run over by a car going at fifty or fifty-five. And I could possibly survive that, too. But I’d end up brain-damaged or paralyzed or a vegetable or in a coma. There were too many risks involved to just jump off the bridge. For a few seconds I stood there, lost and not sure of what to do next. My next thought, my third one, was that maybe, just maybe, this is what hitting bottom really feels like. Maybe something good for me and my life was just around the corner. Maybe if I hold out a little longer, I’d find a reason to live my life and live it well. My fourth thought brought me to Maurice. “Wouldn’t that be the best revenge, that I overcome every situation in my life and become successful? Wouldn’t making the ultimate comeback from the edge of the cliff be better than ending it all now?,” I thought. With that, I got down from the stone wall and went on a long walk through Pelham before going home. I wasn’t relieved, but I wasn’t ready to take my own life yet either.

This was the moment I decided no one else was ever going to make another decision about religion or my eternal spirit for me ever again. That I was no longer a Hebrew-Israelite. But I needed more to believe in, sometime bigger than me, because it was way too early yet for me to simply believe in myself. The only way being an atheist made any sense to me was only if there really was no god or God at all, and the scientific evidence didn’t lean in any direction. Plus, if atheism were a proven fact, and not just a belief born of both science and emotion, then suicide made perfect sense, and after coming off that ledge, it really didn’t seem rational anymore.

Thank God Facebook or Twitter didn’t exist in ’83. Between Alex and Starling and Wendy, my family and their religion, our poverty and my PTSD, all it would’ve taken thirty years ago would’ve been one tweet or post, and the timeline for me that now includes three degrees, three careers, a wife and a son (not to mention two books) wouldn’t exist. But if there really are alternate universes, then I killed myself in at least one of them three decades ago. And to that version of me, I get it, I understand, and I’m sorry that you didn’t make it.

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Universal Orlando, January 8, 2011. (Ian Boichat via Flickr.com). In public domain.

I’ve written so many times already about the state of education reform and how corporate interests via private philanthropy, government conservatism and the technocratic generation have been hell-bent in deforming public education. I’ve even given some glimpses into my own son’s journey through elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland over the past five years, as they’ve watered-down their curriculum and grading system while ratcheting up their testing regimen. It’s all led me to one conclusion. We need to do something for my 10-year-old son that neither me nor my wife would’ve ever gone through ourselves, especially with middle school a few months away.

The way I see it, we have four choices going into the 2014-15 school year and beyond:

1. Finding a private school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

2. Finding an appropriate parochial school for our son to attend, especially for seventh and eighth grade;

3. I become a certified home schooler in time for my son’s sixth, seventh and eighth grade experiences, and educate him myself for a year or two;

4. Somehow find work overseas so that my son can get a proper, non-US public education in say, Canada, the UK, even Hong Kong or Cuba at this point.

Gonzaga College High School, Washington, DC, April 12, 2010. (AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via Creative Commons.

There are certain drawbacks to all of these options, of course. A good private school in the DC area is a $15,000 per year prospect or more (as much as $30,000 per year at the upper end). And though my son can and sometimes does excel, he’s just a slightly above-average student (at least, according to MSA, MAP-M, MAP-R and a whole bunch of other tests), meaning scholarship money isn’t likely. The past two years of constant testing have sucked the joy of learning out of my kid’s memory banks. The only reason he reads at home at all is because we make him, not because he’s bought into the idea of reading and the world of imagination that it connects to. Not exactly the way to glide in for a tour of a school in Bethesda, Chevy Chase or DC.

With parochial schools, though definitely within our budget, the question becomes how much constant retraining would we have to do on the religious side. We’re non-denominational Christians, and ones would do not regularly go to church, either. Between the Catholic and Jewish schools, it could get confusing for our school. Yes, I know that they’ve become more secular since my days in K-12, but it does beg the question of whether we’d be trading in one set of endless headaches for another. On the other hand, going to a parochial school’s still likely better than a constant battery of tests for students-turned-lab-rats.

I’ve given homeschooling a lot of thought. It would be a piece of cake for the state to certify me. But it would reduce my income, already up and down since I became an adjunct professor and part-time consultant five years ago. It would curtail my ability to find new and additional work, as my days would be filled with teaching my son myself. Heck, my son might resent not being around kids his own age after a couple of months! But a year of homeschooling from me might be all my son needs. I have the potential to do in one year what my son’s public education couldn’t do in three. Especially if I could resuscitate his joy for learning.

What about finding work that would allow us to escape America’s badly damaged public education system? Sure, but I’d be (and am) competing with folks who already live in Canada, the UK and Hong Kong (among other places). My skills include teaching US, African American and World History and grad courses in Education Foundations, writing articles and books and a decade as a nonprofit manager. Unique, but not so in-demand and so unique that Canadians would beat down my door to hire me just because of my skills. Yet, all it takes is finding one job, one position overseas that could change all of our life trajectories.

With all of that, it appears that these are all better choices than sticking with Montgomery County Public Schools for the next seven years. The Common Core — really, the Common Snore of killing students’ imaginations, teachers’ autonomy and the attempt at critical thinking all at once — has arrived. And it is truly a not-so-silent death knell to public education as a vehicle for social change or social justice. So we need to make some life-altering choices, not the kind our federal and state governments and local school boards provide. And we need to make them soon.

Wife and son, latter at two weeks and change old, August 16, 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

This week eleven years ago is when I first learned from my wife that she was pregnant with our one and only child, our son Noah. It was a high that took a few months of post-natal sleep deprivation to come down from, not to mention a fight to keep my job and move on from it courtesy of AED in ’03 and early ’04. But learning that I was soon to become a father didn’t just bring joy and euphoria. It came with baggage and the fear that my baggage would be a handicap to me as a father and to my gestating son.

Luckily I had a bit of time to prepare for becoming a father. I figured out that my wife was pregnant a few weeks before she did. It was on Thanksgiving Day ’02, and I was whisking a cream sauce to go with some chocolate torte dessert I was making. I asked my wife to watch over the cream and to make sure that it didn’t boil over when I went to the bathroom. Sure enough, the sauce was boiling over when I came back. I said sarcastically, “Thanks for messing up the cream!,” which led to my wife going to the bathroom, crying. You have to understand, my wife rarely cries, and never cries over my brand of New York-esque sarcasm. So when she said, “I’m sorry,” I said, “It’s okay, honey,” followed by, “Why are you literally crying over boiling cream? Are you sure you’re not pregnant?”

From that moment until my wife had given herself an EPT test three weeks later, I’d already started the process of psychological preparation. We’d barely begun trying to have a kid. We talked about it in July ’02, changed our diets in August and September, and I started taking herbal supplements by the end of September. Two months of actual trying in total. Really? That’s all it took?

All I knew was that fatherhood would bring back so many memories, some good, most of them bad and ugly. About my father Jimme and his alcoholism and homophobia as directed at me, my ex-stepfather’s physical and psychological abuse, about having to serve in my father-like role with my younger siblings and with Darren. By the time I’d reached grad student, some eleven years earlier, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever fall in love or get married, much less become a father. I mean, who would want to be with me, have little Donalds and Donnas running around that had about half of my features and traits? I wasn’t sure if I’d ever want that.

Fast-forward through grad school at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, through four and half years of dating and two years of marriage. I was in a different place, not much different, but different enough to be much more sure about what I wanted. As I said to my wife, “There are four days out of the week where I’m sure about having a kid, two where I don’t want a child, and one where I simply don’t know.”

That was still good enough for my wife. And she’s the reason I could be firmly committed to fatherhood. I don’t think that I would’ve become a father otherwise. Have I made mistakes over the past ten years and five months with Noah? Of course! I once left him in a carrier on our table when he was five months over, and it flipped over end-over-end, scaring the crap out of him (literally!). I’ve yelled at him when I shouldn’t have, and I’ve cursed out at least one hundred too many bad DC area drivers with him in the back seat of our Honda Element over the years.

But despite all of the ups and downs in my life, career(s) and even marriage, one of the handful of things I’m sure about is having become a father to my son a good eight and a half months before he was born. I still check on him nearly every night to watch him sleep (and breath).

While I think it’s wonderful in one sense for Beyonce fans that she put out her latest album directly via iTunes, it’s not exactly earth-shattering or a demonstration of independence. Didn’t Prince pave the way here 17 years ago by going around Sony to put an album out directly on the Internet? Not exactly an original idea.

And for those who aren’t Beyonce fans but did get hyped up on her showing of “power,” really? Beyonce was powerless before, a commodity that the music industry bought and sold until 36 hours ago? I call hypocrisy here. Beyonce’s already in a privileged position and caste. She could have walked down Times Square and handed out 100 copies of her album and videos and sold them from her website and would’ve sold out.

That she used a platform within iTunes specifically created for the unknown artist or writer to put out her new material is neither brave nor something that is particularly innovative. In fact, it’s something that actually can have a corrosive effect on the new and unknown folks who do not have the access, privilege or money to put out their own albums and books like Beyonce just did.

I’m not saying that Beyonce should or shouldn’t have used the iTunes publishing platform here. It’s free and easy enough for my 10-year-old son to use. But we shouldn’t praise Beyonce for doing so, especially if it means fledgling artists and writers get crowded out of the marketplace as a result. (via http://huff.to/18rQU6t)

For those of you who can’t stand Amazon.com or Jeff Bezos, the paperback version of Boy @ The Window‘s now available at/on Barnes & Noble website (it’s also supposed to be at stores, but that’s at store’s individual discretion — can still order it from store if not on shelf, though). The link is here: http://bit.ly/1coNsp5. It’s the holidays — please check it out and buy here or elsewhere, read and give your feedback! Season’s Greetings!

My brother Darren turns forty-six years old today. With all that’s happened in our lives, it would be easy for me to forget that Darren’s my older brother, that he learned how to read on his own at three years old, that he taught me how to read right around my fifth birthday. Yet if I go back in time far enough, I can still see the Darren that was before his fourteen years at a school for the mentally retarded in Clear View at Briarcliff Manor had permanently screwed him up.

Between the ages of ten and sixteen (or, between late ’77 and early ’84, my brother worked on his own personal comic strip series, one he called Dwayne and Cindy. I guess he got the character names from two of his favorite shows, What’s Happening!! and The Brady Bunch. Darren started slowly at first, figuring out how to draw his characters. They were both Black, kids that were about the same age as we were. They were best friends who went outside to play, went on walks or otherwise hung out at Dwayne’s place playing or watching TV.

So when Darren added his bubble captions to tell his stories, they were simple strips about life in the suburbs, about going for walks to the store, about school and homework and how their parents were always too hard on them. As with all things that required creativity, Darren drew from what he knew from living in Mount Vernon and going to school at Clear View, which back in the late-’70s was in Dobby Ferry, and not so Bruce Wayne-stately-manor-looking as it is today.

As Darren got older, he fleshed out Dwayne and Cindy some more. They had similar personalities, where they used each other to escape what seemed to be a harsh world outside of their bubble. But Darren would never draw nor talk about this harsh world in his strips. He wanted them to be funny and goofy, after all, not just a reflection of everything that was going on at 616 and with our parents/idiot stepfather.

At the same time, though, Darren as a comic strip writer hadn’t grown to the point where he could capture more complex issues in his form. I said as much when he asked me to look at a more mature version of Dwayne and Cindy in ’82. “Why do Dwayne and Cindy say the same thing all the time? Don’t they grow up or think about other stuff?,” I asked with some impatience, hoping that Darren would want to talk about race, or growing up, or make Dwayne and Cindy into teenagers.

And on this one, Darren didn’t immediately give up. For two more years, until the beginning of the summer of ’84, he did try to make Dwayne and Cindy more mature. But between the loss of our bedroom to younger siblings and then the whole Balkis Makeda affair in ’84, combined with the completion of the institutionalization process at Clear View, Darren no longer had the creative spirit. His psychological reserves to see himself as normal, as a whole human being, as a young Black man, were all but gone, and have never returned.

I sometimes think that Darren had a window of opportunity to pull himself out of the psychological hole that my Mom, my father and Clear View put him in between ’74 and ’88. And he did. Through me and through that Dwayne and Cindy comic strip of his. In so many ways, his was a genius with the potential of an Aaron McGruder, some of which did rub off on me.

But being around the severely mentally retarded and a group of teachers and psychologists who coddled and infantilized the toughness out of him, the toughness Darren needed to succeed as well as survive our ordeal at 616. That, more than anything, extinguished Dwayne and Cindy and his chances at a rich life before he was old enough to vote. Which is why on every ninth of December, I’m so sad, for him and for me. Yes, I feel guilty, and yes, I know it’s not my fault, but I still miss the promising version of my older brother. I wish that Darren could’ve published Dwayne and Cindy, even the simple versions he began to draw and write thirty six years ago.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: